Summer 2006

After the Clean Elections fiasco, campaign finance laws leave politics to the rich and the long in office Summer 2006 gentlemen (and women), check your wallets. On your marks. Get set. Go. It’s off to the races, with a stable of millionaires dominating the 2006 campaign for governor and pouring an unprecedented amount of their(...)

Daquane Mitchell, Wilkerson Catule, and Steve Dufrene,working at Fenway Park, got a break not shared bymany other black teenagers. as director of the city of Boston’s job training programs, Conny Doty keeps a close eye on workforce trends and economic forecasts. But some of her best intelligence comes from her own field research, usually involving(...)

Route 1, in Saugus, took a dipduring this May’s floods.Photo by Nancy Lane/Boston Herald when disaster strikes, the planning that happened ahead of time means everything. With that in mind, shortly after taking office in January, Methuen Mayor William Manzi tapped former state secretary of public safety James Jajuga to study the city’s emergency preparedness.(...)

sometime around the middle of September a switch will be flicked, and the airwaves of Maynard will once again be filled with local music shows, community announcements, high school football games, and church services. This might seem unremarkable. After all, tiny WAVM Radio (91.7 FM) has been broadcasting from Maynard High School since 1974, and(...)

if you thought the Bay State’s flat population growth meant more room for parking, forget it. According to the state Department of Revenue, the number of registered passenger vehicles in Massachusetts grew 6.6 percent from January 2000 to January 2005, while the number of people living here crept up by 1.1 percent over roughly the(...)

Do democracy and mudslinging go together like ice cream and apple pie? this spring in California, a candidate for a legislative seat attacked his Republican-primary opponent for having had a heart transplant. “Tom Berryhill doesn’t have the heart for State Assembly,” read a flier put out by Bill Conrad. “Can you imagine the costs to(...)

Filling up at the gas station for a weekend on Cape Cod has taken on new significance this summer as prices hover around $3 a gallon. High energy prices have long contributed to the cost of living and doing business in Massachusetts. But now, as the crunch seems to be getting worse, energy could represent(...)

meet john doe. He earns about $70,000 a year running his own design firm. He’s also been collecting unemployment insurance for 24 years running-and it’s all legal. John Doe is a UI scammer, and he’s not alone. Not by a long shot. The Massachusetts unemployment insurance system was intended to provide temporary income to those(...)

Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on ResultsBy Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 528 pages in redefining health care, Michael Porter of Harvard Business School and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg of the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia have lent their prodigious intellects and broad(...)

I don’t know Christopher Lydon personally, though I know of him pretty well, I think, from my own experiences with editors who thought highly of him and his work and his manner during my years as an editor at The Boston Globe, from 1966 to 2000. I’m not typing to quarrel with Lydon’s central thesis(...)